The Inventor of the Horse and Two Other Short Plays

David E. Kemp is a professor of drama at Queen’s University and the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

The plays of Achille Campanile (1899–1977) combine the visual
slapstick of the silent cinema with the outrageous and zany humor of the
Marx Brothers and the nonsensical dialogue of Eugиne Ionesco. Written
in the 1920s and early 1930s, the plays gathered in this volume are a
direct antecedent of the theatre of the absurd that was to change the
face of world theatre some four decades later. Essentially satirical
parables about the middle class, Campanile’s plays are not mere
academic exercises in the avant-garde, condemned by their very nature to
be read and studied but not performed. Rather, they are wonderfully
funny, insightful, theatrical, and highly relevant to the 1990s.
Guernica Editions and Francesco Lorriggio are to be congratulated for
rescuing Campanile from undeserved obscurity.